Another dumb idea

Students, don't waste your time with ideas like this: Corrupted-File.com. What a lame way to get around writing a paper.

(Basically this is a web site that promises to send you a corrupted Word, Excel, or Powerpoint file so that you can send the corrupted file to your insructor and buy yourself a few extra days writing a paper.)

First of all, anyone who needs a few extra days to make a Powerpoint.... ?!?!? I don't know. Second of all, I can't wait to get one of those files sent to me :) I will love to look inside it. Thirdly, I wonder how much they make at $3.95 a pop? Also knowing that there's no recourse if they send you a file that doesn't work, or if you get caught.... geez. What a racket.

Finally, whoops, by publishing this, I guess I'm annoying the owners of the site who say "Keep this site a secret!"

Mechanical Turk

I have to tell you I feel absolutely fascinated by Mechanical Turk (the original Amazon version and the nascent generic versions), from the perspective of micro-tasks, from a labor perspective, from a computer science perspective. Here's the wrap-up of a recent Mechanical Turk meetup about these topics.

How to be happy in your work

How to be happy in your work: Memorize this Venn diagram: What we do well - What we can get paid to do - What we want to do

Open Source Conference, Day One

I'll add to this post as I go through the day.

Where am I? I'm blogging from the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems in Skovde (pronounced HURVdeh), Sweden. I've been to the previous 3 conferences as well, but missed the first year.

Who else is here? After a show of hands, we determined that more people are here from business than government (of course most people are here from academia), and more than half of the people are here for the first time.

What am I doing here? I am presenting a paper called "Using FLOSS project metadata in the undergraduate classroom" that I wrote with my colleague Shannon Duvall at Elon.

Day One:
Women in OSS breakfast 7:30-9:00. We were greeted with a lovely breakfast for everyone, and then there was a separate short meeting with some women interested in OSS. We had a speaker Eliza Roszkowska Öberg, a member of Swedish Parliament, briefly present about what Sweden is doing with e-Government and how open source is involved there.

Keynote speaker: Stormy Peters from Gnome Fndtn is talking about "Open source is changing the way work gets done". Her main points: Collaboration, across companies, history of open source, how to make money on open source a bit.

Session 1: Commercial open source
Session 2: Mining open source
Session 3: Communities of open source

Some notes on talk 3A1: Brooks' Law & open source.
--issues of coordination and early productivity.
--creating graphs of community cohesion based on shared artifacts as the links between people on a project. Take people and artifacts from svn repository (cohesion is average shortest path between people); edges between artifacts are weighted (e.g. people have worked on 8 artifacts together, this is weight); Use Floyd-Warshall to measure shortest paths between nodes; use Kamada-Kawai algorithm to place high edge weights together for viz purposes.

Social event & dinner: informal dress. Not sure where it is yet, but they showed a picture of water, so...?